Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 –
August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver
is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and
also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the
1980s.

Life

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on
the Columbia
River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. His father, a
sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a violent alcoholic. Carver's
mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His one
brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.

Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In
his spare time he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as
Sports Afield and Outdoor Life and hunted and fished with friends
and family. After graduating from Yakima
High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill
in California. In June 1957, aged 19, he married 16-year-old
Maryann Burk. She had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter,
Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957. When their second
child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year, Carver
was 20. Carver supported his family by working as a janitor,
sawmill laborer, delivery man, and library assistant. During their
marriage, Maryann worked as a waitress, salesperson, administrative
assistant, and teacher.

Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had
moved with his family because his mother-in-law had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a
creative-writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, who became a
mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career.
Carver continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt State College in Arcata,
California, where he studied with Richard Cortez Day and received
his B.A. in 1963. During this period he was first published and
served as editor for Toyon, the university literary magazine, in
which he included several of his own pieces under pseudonyms. He
later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the
University
of Iowa, for one year. Maryann graduated from San Jose State
College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until
1977.

In the mid-1960s Carver and his family lived in Sacramento, where he worked as a
night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He sat in on classes at what was
then Sacramento State
College including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver's first book of
poems, Near Klamath, was published in 1968 by the English
Club of Sacramento State College.

With his appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the
impending publication of Near Klamath, and the death of
his father, 1967 was a landmark year. That was also the year that
he moved his family to Palo Alto, California, so that he
could take a job as a textbook editor for Science Research
Associates. He worked there until he was fired in 1970 for his
inappropriate writing style. In the 1970s and 1980s as his writing
career began to take off, Carver taught for several years at
universities throughout the United States.

During the years of working in different jobs, rearing children,
and trying to write, Carver started to drink heavily and stated
that alcohol became such a problem in his life that he more or less
gave up and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of
1973, Carver was a teacher in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but
Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost
no writing. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Cheever went to
a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but Carver continued drinking
for three years. After being hospitalized three times (between June
1976 and February or March 1977), Carver began his 'second life'
and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference
in Dallas, Texas in 1978. From May until August, 1979, Carver and
Gallagher lived in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, in western
Washington state. In September, the two moved to Syracuse, where
Gallagher had been appointed the Coordinator of the Creative
Writing Program at Syracuse University; Carver taught as a
professor in the English department. He and Gallagher jointly
purchased a house in Syracuse, at 832 Maryland Avenue. In ensuing
years, the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a
sign outside that read "Writers At Work" in order to be left alone.
In 1982, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced.[1] He
married Gallagher in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988,
Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age
of 50. In the same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of
Arts and Letters.

Raymond Carver is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port
Angeles, WA. The inscription on his grave reads:

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

His poem Gravy is also inscribed.

As Carver's will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the management
of his literary estate.

In 2001 the novelist Chuck Kinder published Honeymooners: A
Cautionary Tale, a roman à clef of his friendship with Carver
in the 1970s. In 2006 Maryann Burk Carver wrote a memoir of her
years with Carver: What It Used To Be Like; A Portrait of My
Marriage to Raymond Carver.

Writing

Carver's career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He
described himself as "inclined toward brevity and intensity" and
"hooked on writing short stories" (in the foreword of Where I'm Calling From, a
collection published in 1988 and a recipient of an honorable
mention in the 2006 New York Times
article citing the best works of fiction of the previous 25 years).
Another stated reason for his brevity was "that the story [or poem]
can be written and read in one sitting." This was not simply a
preference but, particularly at the beginning of his career, a
practical consideration as he juggled writing with work. His
subject matter was often focused on blue-collar experience,
and was clearly reflective of his own life. The same could probably
be said of the recurring theme of alcoholism and recovery.

Minimalism is
generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver's work. His editor
at Esquire magazine, Gordon Lish, was
instrumental in shaping Carver's prose in this direction - where
his earlier tutor John Gardner had advised Carver
to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five, Gordon Lish instructed Carver to use five
in place of fifteen. Objecting to the "surgical amputation and
transplantation" of Lish's heavy editing, Carver eventually broke
with him.[2] During
this time, Carver also submitted poetry to James Dickey, then poetry editor of
Esquire. His style has also been described as Dirty realism,
which connected him with a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s
that included Richard
Ford, Tobias
Wolff -- two writers Carver was closely acquainted with -- as
well as Ann Beattie
and Jayne Anne Phillips. With the
exception of Beattie, who wrote about upper-middle class people,
these were writers who focused on sadness and loss in the everyday
lives of ordinary people -- often lower-middle class or isolated
and marginalized people -- who represent Henry David
Thoreau's idea of living lives of "quiet desperation."

His first published story appeared in 1960, titled "The Furious
Seasons." More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore
the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious Seasons"
was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by
Capra Press, and can now be found in recent collections No
Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.

His first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet,
Please?, was first published in 1976; the title story had
appeared in the Best American Short Stories 1967
collection. The collection itself was shortlisted for the National
Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that year.

Carver was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press
collection, Cathedral, the volume generally perceived as
his best. Included in the collection are the award-winning stories
"A Small, Good Thing", and "Where I'm Calling From". John Updike selected
the latter for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of
the Century. For his part, Carver saw Cathedral as a
watershed in his career, in its shift towards a more optimistic and
confidently poetic style.

His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled
Elephant in Britain (included in "Where I'm Calling From")
was composed in the five years before his death. The nature of
these stories, especially "Errand", have led to some speculation
that Carver was preparing to write a novel. Only one piece of this
work has survived - the unpromising fragment "The Augustine
Notebooks," printed in No Heroics, Please.

Tess Gallagher published five Carver stories posthumously in
Call If You Need Me; one of the stories ("Kindling") won
an O. Henry
Award in 1999. Throughout his lifetime Carver won six O. Henry
Awards: the winning stories were "Are These Actual Miles"
(originally titled "What is it?") (1972), "Put Yourself in My
Shoes" (1974), "Are You A Doctor?" (1975), "A Small, Good Thing"
(1983), and "Errand" (1988).

Tess Gallagher fought with Knopf for permission to republish the
stories in What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love as they were originally
written by Carver, as opposed to the heavily-edited (or "heavy
edits") and altered versions that appeared in 1981 under the
editorship of Gordon Lish. [3] The
book, entitled 'Beginners', was released in hardback on October 1st
2009 in Great Britain. 'Beginners' also appears in a new Library of
America edition collecting all of Carver's short fiction.

Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of
40 if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking. When he knew the
cancer would kill him, he wrote a poem about that bonus of 10
years, called "Gravy."[4]

Compilations

Screenplays

Dostoevsky (1985, with Tess Gallagher)

Essays,
poems, stories (uncollected works)

Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1983)

No Heroics, Please (1992)

Call if You Need Me (2000)

Tell It Straight (2003)

These books gather otherwise uncollected works. Fires
covers Carver's career during the period 1966–82. The latter
volumes were published posthumously, and include early fiction,
essays, and reviews of other authors. Call if You Need Me
was identical to No Heroics, Please apart from the
replacement of poetry in the latter with new stories, two found in
Carver's desk by his last partner, Tess Gallagher and three found in his
archives by scholar William Stull. Tell It Straight is
limited to an edition of 20 artist books, and includes three
previously unpublished poems left out of At Night the Salmon
Move. This limited edition was bound and illustrated by Andy
Pirie, at the Assembly Line Press in Bozrah, CT.

Films and
theatre

Carver, a
production directed by William Gaskill at London's Arcola Theatre
in 1995, adapted from five Carver short stories including
What's in Alaska, Put Yourself in My Shoes, and
Intimacy.

Studentova žena (Croatian), directed by Goran
Kovač, based on The Student's Wife

Music

The 1989 album So Much Water So Close to
Home by Australian singer-songwriter Paul
Kelly, includes a track "Everything's Turning to White" which
is a re-telling of Carver's story So Much Water So Close to
Home.

The 2004 EP by Owen includes a song titled Gazebo, named
after Carver's short story. The song mentions Carver's name, and
also quotes the final line of Gazebo; "In this too, she was
right."

The 2005 album Pocket Revolution by dEUS includes a song titled "What We Talk
About (When We Talk About Love)".

Books and articles about
Carver

Carver, Maryann Burk (2006).
What It Used to Be Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond
Carver. St. Martin's Press. ISBN
0-312-33258-0.

The novel Name Your Poison: A Max Mitchum Mystery, by
Lucas Stensland, was a comical attempt by the author to combine the
styles of "the two Raymonds": Carver and Chandler. The book was
intended to be a tribute.

References

^
What It Used To Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond
Carver, St. Martin's Press (July 11, 2006)

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century. He was also helped improve short story writing in the 1980s.

Life

Early life and first marriage

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington.[1] His father was a skilled sawmill worker from Arkansas. He was a fisherman and a heavy drinker. Carver's mother sometimes worked as a waitress and as a clerk in a shop. He had one brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.

Carver studied at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life and hunted and fished with friends and family. After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June 1957, aged 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk. She had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957. When their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year, Carver was 20. Carver supported his family by working as a janitor, sawmill laborer, delivery man, and library assistant. During their marriage, Maryann worked as a waitress, salesperson, administrative assistant, and high school English teacher.

California and beginning to write

Carver became interested in writing in California. He had moved there with his family because his mother-in-law had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a creative-writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner. Gardner became his mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career. Carver continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California, where he studied with Richard Cortez Day. Carver received his B.A. in 1963. During this period he was first published and served as editor for the university literary magazine called Toyon. Carver included some of his own writing under pen names. He later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, for one year. Maryann graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.

In the mid-1960s Carver and his family lived in Sacramento. He worked as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He sat in on classes at what was then Sacramento State College including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver's first book of poems, Near Klamath, was later written and published with helpful advice from Schmitz.

With his appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the impending publication of Near Klamath by the English Club of Sacramento State College, and the death of his father, 1967 was a landmark year for Carver. That was also the year that he moved his family to Palo Alto, California, so that he could take a job as a textbook editor for Science Research Associates. He worked there until he was fired in 1970 for his inappropriate writing style. In the 1970s and 1980s as his writing career began to take off, Carver taught for several years at universities throughout the United States.

Alcoholism

During his years of working different jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started to drink heavily.[1] He said that he eventually more or less gave up writing and started drinking all of the time. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a teacher in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver said that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Cheever went to a treatment center to try to overcome his alcoholism, but Carver continued drinking for three years. After going in the hospital three times (between June 1976 and February or March 1977), Carver began his 'second life' and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.[1]

Later life and second marriage

Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas in November, 1977. Beginning in January, 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas, in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, in western Washington state, and in Tucson, Arizona. In 1980, they moved to Syracuse. Gallagher was the coordinator of the creative writing program at Syracuse University. Carver was a professor in the English department. He and Gallagher bought a house in Syracuse, at 832 Maryland Avenue. Later, the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a sign outside that read "Writers At Work" so that people would leave them alone. In 1982, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced.[2] He married Gallagher in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Raymond Carver is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, WA. The words on his grave are:

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Writing

Carver's career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He often wrote about blue-collar experiences. These were similar to his own life. In the same way, he often included themes of alcoholism and recovery from his life.

His first published story appeared in 1960, titled "The Furious Seasons." His first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976. The story with the same name had already appeared in the collection, Best American Short Stories 1967.

Tess Gallagher published five Carver stories after he died in a book called Call If You Need Me. One of the stories, "Kindling", won an O. Henry Award in 1999. Throughout his lifetime Carver won six O. Henry Awards: the winning stories were: "Are These Actual Miles" (originally titled "What is it?") (1972), "Put Yourself in My Shoes" (1974), "Are You A Doctor?" (1975), "A Small, Good Thing" (1983), and "Errand" (1988).

Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking. When he knew the cancer would kill him, he wrote a poem about that bonus of 10 years, called "Gravy."[3]

The novel Name Your Poison: A Max Mitchum Mystery, by Lucas Stensland, was a comical attempt by the author to combine the styles of "the two Raymonds": Carver and Chandler. The book was intended to be a tribute.